I don’t know if it was intentional, but the more than one hundred people, both supporters and press, attending Gov. Rick Perry’s press conference this morning on Israel and the United Nations were facing east, synagogue-style. The podium—the bimah-manqué—at which Perry spoke and then served as emcee for several other speakers, including deputy Knesset speaker Danny Danon, Rep.-elect Bob Turner, and Orthodox power broker Dov Hikind, faced west. And where the ark would be, there were a couple dozen supporters, many in kippahs—I’d bet Turner and Perry were the only two non-Jews up there—who stood in front of a blue curtain and the flags of the United States and Israel. The room was faux-classical, with marble columns, on the second floor of the sorta-hip W hotel on Manhattan’s Union Square. There were no metal detectors, but obvious bodyguards stood on either side of the front of the room. Perry emerged with several of the other luminaries, and they greeted the supporters as though we, the press, weren’t there; we were complicit in the pageant.

“NOTE: Gov. Perry frequently deviates from prepared remarks,” the printed remarks begin, but he mostly stuck to them. You can read them all over the Internet. They mostly echoed his op-ed last week: Israel is “our oldest and strongest democratic ally in the Middle East.” His critiques of the Obama administration are actually mainly tactical, but with force of rhetoric they turn into attacks on values: the call for the settlement freeze, the “indirect negotiations” (remember those?), were not just pragmatically counterproductive (which even supporters of the president would likely admit), he said, but substantive betrayals. And: “It was wrong for this Administration to suggest the 1967 borders should be the starting point.” And: A Palestinian move at the U.N. should not only threaten U.S. funding to the Palestinian Authority but, if the U.N. approves it, U.S. funding to the U.N. Perry also called for the closing of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s office in Washington, D.C. Loudest applause was reserved for the words “Jewish state” and the insistence that Gilad Shalit must be freed.

I don’t know if it was intentional, but the more than one hundred people, both supporters and press, attending Gov. Rick Perry’s press conference this morning on Israel and the United Nations were facing east, synagogue-style. The podium—the bimah-manqué—at which Perry spoke and then served as emcee for several other speakers, including deputy Knesset speaker Danny Danon, Rep.-elect Bob Turner, and Orthodox power broker Dov Hikind, faced west. And where the ark would be, there were a couple dozen supporters, many in kippahs—I’d bet Turner and Perry were the only two non-Jews up there—who stood in front of a blue curtain and the flags of the United States and Israel. The room was faux-classical, with marble columns, on the second floor of the sorta-hip W hotel on Manhattan’s Union Square. There were no metal detectors, but obvious bodyguards stood on either side of the front of the room. Perry emerged with several of the other luminaries, and they greeted the supporters as though we, the press, weren’t there; we were complicit in the pageant.

“NOTE: Gov. Perry frequently deviates from prepared remarks,” the printed remarks begin, but he mostly stuck to them. You can read them all over the Internet. They mostly echoed his op-ed last week: Israel is “our oldest and strongest democratic ally in the Middle East.” His critiques of the Obama administration are actually mainly tactical, but with force of rhetoric they turn into attacks on values: the call for the settlement freeze, the “indirect negotiations” (remember those?), were not just pragmatically counterproductive (which even supporters of the president would likely admit), he said, but substantive betrayals. And: “It was wrong for this Administration to suggest the 1967 borders should be the starting point.” And: A Palestinian move at the U.N. should not only threaten U.S. funding to the Palestinian Authority but, if the U.N. approves it, U.S. funding to the U.N. Perry also called for the closing of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s office in Washington, D.C. Loudest applause was reserved for the words “Jewish state” and the insistence that Gilad Shalit must be freed.